We Got Spammed

After operating GenealogyBlog.com for nearly 9 years, I finally got spammed bad enough to take our site down. We use WordPress to write the blog, and various plugin tools to catch the spam, and delete it – and overall, it’s working pretty well. However, sometime on Sunday we got hit with sufficient garbage that our web hosting service (Bluehost) disabled our site as of around midnight, fearing that the spam would cause havoc for other users of the shared commercial server.

Since I had to be on a flight to Cincinnati this morning, Patty went into the admin side of GenealogyBlog, and found a total of about 50 spams residing on the server, and deleted them. To me that seems like very little, as I clean out an average of probably several hundred a day from the Spam box – as well as another twenty or so that slide through (asking for my okay before being posted), and I have to manually remove them.

Anyway, the site is back up again, and I’m about to go in and add some additional spam filtering recommended by Bluehost.

I find it astonishing how many idiots there are in this world who seem to have nothing better to do than cause other folks harm… Thank God that 99.9% of folks aren’t like that. Now back to work.

2 thoughts on “We Got Spammed”

There are several other options available if you use a different blog hosting company. My blog doesn’t have any plug-ins at all, other than what the hosting company uses for all their customers. I rarely see a spam message.